How I Perpetuated an Internet Rumor About the Duck Hunt Dog
One of the things I aim to do with this site is refute persistent urban legends about video games. Stories like the one about Pac-Man being inspired by a hockey puck are oddly self-perpetuating. They get mentioned somewhere, someone adds it to some Wikipedia page, and then people using Wikipedia (and only Wikipedia) to research a given topic end up including the claim in their own writings. Later, when someone tries to verify the dubious claim, those same writings get cited as sources proving the claim, even though they only exist because of it. The cycle repeats, usually enabled by otherwise well-meaning people who have just heard the claim so many times they don’t question it.
Fighting this kind of bad information online may seem like a sisyphean task, but I swear it’s worth the effort. I have to admit, however, that I accidentally played a role in the spread of a specific untrue “fact” regarding the laughing dog from Duck Hunt. Surely, you know of whom I speak.
In early 2009, I wrote a very short post on my personal blog, Back of the Cereal Box, about how the Nintendo Vs. release of Duck Hunt actually allows you to shoot the dog. I’ve never played this title, but just seeing that blasted dog get, well, blasted was cathartic after years of that dog’s cruel, mocking laughter echoing in my brain.
In the post, I also mention that the dog’s name is apparently Mr. Peepers, because I’d read that somewhere, assumed it was true without doublechecking, and then slapped it online. This got compounded later that same year when I published the “It’s a Secret to Everybody” post, a massive, not adequately factchecked history of video game character names. This post, more or less, is the genesis of Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games — just that now I’m approaching the subject matter with a better understanding of research, organization, linguistics, Japanese in particular and basically every other facet that goes into making sense of where all this video game stuff comes from. Anyway, in that big write-up, I included the alleged factoid about the Duck Hunt dog’s alleged name, and that post got literally millions of clicks, thanks to links from most of the video game blogs of note from the time. Some of the feedback included people asking where I’d gotten the name Mr. Peepers from, and to be honest, I didn’t know. And when I said that, more than one person accused me of just making it up, which I assure you I did not do.
To be clear: THE DOG’S NAME IS NOT MR. PEEPERS. Not in the Japanese version. Not in the PAL version. Not in any official Nintendo documentation. I was wrong for stating this as fact, and I’m posting this as part of my contrition.
The story, however, goes on past “It’s a Secret to Everybody.” In 2014, leading up to the release of the fourth Smash Bros. game, we learned that the Duck Hunt dog would be appearing as a playable fighter, as a sort of catch-all for all the Zapper Light Gun games of the NES era. There had been rumors that this was the case, and I was particularly interested to find out how they’d refer to him in-game. If the dog’s name truly is Mr. Peepers, then that’s what Nintendo would call him in Smash Bros., I supposed. It’s not, of course, and the dog plus one of the ducks instead debuted as either Duck Hunt or Duck Hunt Duo, depending on the region.
But before that implicit clarification that his name is not Mr. Peepers, people had been wondering, and more than one of them had found me via my post and asked again where the info came from. In fact, one of the video game news sites I read, Tiny Cartridge, even reported the news of Duck Hunt’s surprising representation in Smash Bros. along with the note that the dog is “maybe a.k.a. Mr. Peepers.” Because the question of this character’s name was suddenly in the zeitgeist, I got to looking again for answers, because I was genuinely curious but also to clear my good name — or, I guess, prevent any further gunking of my neutral name.
The search brought me to threads on forums on both NeoGAF and GameFAQs reacting to a 2012 Nintendo World Report article, with the GameFAQs one actually even saying that the name Mr. Peepers came from an old Famitsu interview that was newly translated. (That’s not what the Nintendo World Report piece is at all; instead, it’s the author’s rendition of how Toru Osawa developed Kid Icarus more or less on his own, pulled from a larger interview that ran in the magazine Nintendo Dream in 2004.) Clicking on the piece, however, I saw no mention of the dog’s name, just the aside that Kid Icarus’ Pit was designed by Hiroji Kiyotake, who also created the looks of “Samus and the dog from Duck Hunt.” Clearly, the piece had been edited to omit mention of Mr. Peepers in the window between when the message board threads were created and when I was researching in 2014. So I reached out to the author, who I found on Facebook, to ask him what happened. Here is that exchange, verbatim.
Him: The info came from a blog. On closer inspection the blog was not a reliable source. So it was removed. The name of the dog is unknown and not even mentioned in the Japanese manual.
Me: Well there you go. I know it was a while back, but you wouldn't happen to remember what the original blog was, would you?
Him: [send me a link to my blog]
Yes, in this case, I was the originator of the bad information. I admitted to this and apologized. He did not respond beyond that point, which I sort of get. I felt lousy, and so I did the only thing a blogger can do when he feels bad: blog more! Specifically, I wrote a follow-up to the 2009 post that admitted to my own sloppiness but also made it clear that I didn’t pull the name out of thin air. For what it’s worth, I did find proof in a Gamespot article about the all-time favorite NES games dated June 30, 2006. In it, Ryan Poole refers to the Duck Hunt dog repeatedly as Mr. Peepers.
That was nearly three years before I said the same thing on my blog, so at the very least I think this proves that I didn’t make it up. But it doesn’t explain where Ryan Poole got the name, much less who was the first person to attach this name Mr. Peepers to this dog in reckless disregard for Nintendo canon. Also? Does anyone reading this blog know Ryan Poole? And do you think he’d be down to answer a question about this blurb he wrote nearly twenty years ago? If so, hit me up!
The name lives on, and a quick search online will find the name Mr. Peepers here and there, attached to everything from fan-crafted decals to memes to DeviantArt posts to this Tumblr. There’s a post on VHFacts.com that specifically links to my old blog post to refute that the characters name is Mr. Peepers. The TV Tropes page for Duck Hunt specifically calls Mr. Peepers a “disputedly apocryphal” nickname going back to “an interview, but readers are left confused as the name has apparently been edited out,” and I guess that one is on me. It’s less clear who’s to blame for the name’s inclusion in a 2011 “genius guide” about classic video game hardware.
I would like to think that Imagine Publishing employs a fact-checker, but I’d hate to think that this “fact” was checked using my old blog.
I suppose the lesson I want you to take away from this, aside from the fact that the dog from Duck Hunt is not actually named Mr. Peepers, is that we need to be careful about what we put online — not for the stranger danger reason that people warned us about in the 90s but because people are listening. We can’t count on people to read critically, necessarily, so at the very least we have to make sure we write critically. That probably sounds overly serious. Me
spreading the Mr. Peepers contagion didn’t do all that much damage, all things said, but it’s not hard to imagine a parallel situation where someone writing words online could end up propagating something a lot more harmful. Like, no one got shot as a result of me boosting the idea that the Duck Hunt dog has a silly name, but this did give me pause about how easy it is to repeat an untrue thing and then watch others run with it. On this site, I’m really trying to cover my own ass and only print what survives my own verification process — and if I get something wrong, I want to make it clear not only what’s right but also that I fucked up in printing something incorrect.
Even if it’s a little funny that there are people on message boards saying that we’re doing this fictional dog a great disservice by not referring to him by his proper name — and yes, there are most definitely some Mr. Peepers truthers out there — here’s to contributing to everyone’s appreciation of video games in only positive ways from here on out.
(But between you and me, you can call him Mr. Peepers if you really want to.)
Miscellaneous Notes
There are two other instances of this name in western culture, though I’m not sure if either make much sense in connection with Duck Hunt. Mister Peepers was a sitcom that ran on NBC for three seasons, July 3, 1952 to June 12, 1955.
That’s three seasons but astoundingly 127 episodes, because as I frequently state on my sitcom podcast, TV production really used to grind people into dust back in the day. The title character was a junior high science teacher played by Wally Cox, whose two other claims to fame include being the guy who got Marlon Brando into acting, which isn’t especially relevant here, and voicing the title character in the cartoon series Underdog, which I suppose might be relevant here, because dogs. For whatever it’s worth, however, I’ve been doing a podcast about sitcoms for eight years and I’m not sure this Mister Peepers as ever come up.
The other thing that name can refer to is the recurring Saturday Night Live character played by Chris Kattan. He acted like a monkey and ate apples. This is what we thought was funny in the 1990s.
Can you believe they did this sketch twelve times? I cannot.
I will also point out that the PAL name, Duck Hunt Duo, is kind of inaccurate because as Palutena points out to Pit, this team actually has three members: the dog, the duck and then the unseen third player who is operating the Light Gun Zapper and shooting at the screen.
This fact minorly blew my mind back in the day. You, the human holding the controller, are also playing that person, because you control the reticle onscreen, but it’s implied that there is an extra phantom player operating the Zapper — and an extra frame of reference existing between the world of Smash Bros. and the TV screen in your living room.